By: Yoani Sánchez
It's Saturday night and Street G in the heart of Havana is crammed with
youths sitting on the grass or huddled in the park's darker areas,
flaunting every kind of aesthetic, existential and musical trend and
even their sexual preferences. They form part of the urban tribes which
have gradually invaded Havana when only a few years ago an earring would
have been enough to have a man immediately hauled off to the police
station. Now there is every impression that Cubans suddenly want to make
up for lost time, leaving behind decades of grey militancy when
everybody dressed practically the same. Teenagers opt for highlighting
an individuality which contrasts with the use of political slogans
stressing a highly collective "we."
Night fever has hardly begun on the downtown avenue, which keeps filling
up with outlandishly charming figures. A group of would-be "werewolves"
in dark garb shows up and exchanges greetings with several girls with
vampire make-up. From some nearby balconies the older generation looks
on and mutters something about "lost youth" — repeated so often that it
becomes boring. They say it because this form of dressing, the
aggressive tattoos and the languor which seems to come straight out of a
Japanese comic strip all strike them as grotesque. But above all, the
adults criticize the apathy which they perceive among the young. They
accuse them of living on the margin of reality in a cloud of lethargy,
of being capable of spending all the small hours talking about the
latest playstation game to hit the market or listening to the Lady Gaga
music which they have recorded on their mobile phones. They seem to live
in another place, in a remote dimension where material wants and the
prolonged crisis fail to distract their attention — in their own cosmos
which they have created to escape from the here and now.
Ideological deviation no more. Nevertheless, evoking those days when I
was the age of those now spending the night in Street G, I realize that
we lived in too sober and aging a period. Those were times of volunteer
weekend work, seemingly endless military training and boring state
television as the only distraction. In contrast to these youths today,
we would have interpreted stridently dying our hair or wearing jeans as
an ideological deviation. Not to mention access to imported comic
strips! Any tendency to emphasizing individuality was rejected and
dreaming of fantasies along the lines of Dracula, Lord of the Rings or
Momo could be interpreted as psychological imbalance or a fascination
with capitalism.
Differentiating yourself was the shortest cut to pointing yourself out
as a possible defector from the system. Evasion could be seen as an act
of opposition and the first hippies or rockers who dared to walk down
the street dressed as such were subject to insults and official
repression. Police trucks raided the meeting-points of these urban
tribes and the lumpenproletarian stereotype was characterized in state
television as someone with very tight trousers, tousled hair and sunglasses.
So much uniformity has been abused for so long that when the new forms
of dressing, living and loving started to appear, the rejection of the
older generation could be heard everywhere. Many still cannot accept the
existence of these darkies, werewolves, transvestites and punks within
the society they have been attempting to build on the basis of Marxist
manuals written in the 19th century. Communist Party militants and the
military establishment have found it especially difficult to accept
co-existence with all these phenomena of modern life with the daring of
the most youthful and the explosion of decorative accessories and
body-piercing. But perhaps the most repugnant aspect of these trends for
such critics is their apolitical nature, indifferent to ideology and
extremely difficult to convoke for any state rally.
Youth against fanatic indoctrination. That is why when I see these
indolent kids today, I feel joy and relief. I prefer them apathetic to
fanatical, hanging on their MP3 music files rather than training for
trench warfare. It makes me happy that they have turned activism in the
only legally permitted youth organization or applauding the 80-year-old
leader on his soap-box into anachronisms. When I see them, I know they
can wake up from their sloth or shrug off the apathy they are now
showing. It will be much easier for them than for us to lay aside the
fanaticism and break with the indoctrination.
http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/69542/the-castros-and-cuba
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